Price Baum taught love and perseverance

“Mate, I was born a sailor in 1958,” Price Baum laughed as he told me the story of his birth.  We were enjoying his favorite ale at First Pier in Oxford.  “Mind you, my dear mother was in her ninth month when she joined dad on a sail,” he continued, shaking his head.  “Apparently they were unaware the tail end of a hurricane was sweeping up Chesapeake Bay.”

Tossed and buffeted violently, his parents managed to motor into a cove, but winds shifted, swamping their boat.  His dad rowed a dingy to shore and the two of them trudged through thick brush to a farm house.  Many hours later they made it to Wilmington, Delaware where Price was born. 

Price and I had met at First Pier to discuss raising funds to purchase a new wheelchair lift van for Price’s friend and colleague, Chrissie Jones-Young, an employee of Eastern Shore Center for Independent Living where she assists ersons with disabilities so they can stay in their homes.  Her old van was falling apart.  Helping Chrissie was as natural to Price as breathing.  In the decade I was privileged to know him, he was always engaged in projects to help others. 

Price died in his sleep in October, 2006.  He’d been running a high fever every night for a week and was under a doctor’s care, but his sudden death at age 48 hit his family and friends like an unexpected punch in the stomach. 

Price’s family quickly decided to give his van to Chrissie.

Price was 22, celebrating with friends at Royal Oak; a handsome, free spirit, strong and agile when he dove into shallow water and broke his neck.  An expert sailor who had served in the Merchant Marine, he’d planned to fly to Bermuda the following morning to sail a friend’s boat back to Annapolis.  Instead, he awoke at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, “More scared than I’d ever been in my life.”

Three weeks later, Dr. David McDonald quietly told him he would never walk again.  He was a quadriplegic.  When his parents and brothers came to see him, stretched out on a Striker Frame, he apologized for the sadness he had brought to their lives.  He was moved from rehabilitation in Baltimore to the famed Howard Rusk Clinic near New York University in the Big Apple.

“Doctors Howard Rusk and Henry Betts worked me full-time so I could return to Towson State University,” Price said.  He’d been an outstanding lacrosse player at Blair Academy in New Jersey, and later at Towson, where he graduated with a degree in Mass Communications, crossing the stage in his wheelchair to receive his diploma. He joined the Human Resources Department at the National Rehabilitation Hospital in the nation’s capital where he recruited staff and testified before congressional committees on disability issues.  “It was a fun time to be disabled in Washington,” he said with a wicked grin.

The year 2001 was a rough year for all Americans, and especially for Price whose mother and father died within three days of each other that October.  “Both were powerful influences on my life, and I miss them a lot,” he said, his customary smile fading as he gazed out on the Tred Avon River.  

Despite his sunny outlook on life, his devotion to helping others and his indefatigable spirit, it seemed a dark cloud followed Price around.  On Memorial Day 1987, crossing over the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in his hand-controlled van with girlfriend Maggie Leedy, a car cut him off and he crashed through a barrier, falling 30 feet and landing upside down on the Parkway, miraculously missing other vehicles. When paramedics climbed in the back of the van, he sought help for Maggie, who was unconscious, unaware of his own critical injuries until, as he told me, “I began to barf blood all over our rescuers.”

Maggie suffered a concussion and returned home in two days.  Price was in intensive care ten days and received 45 units of blood.  Multiple surgeries were required, hospitalizing him for almost a year and forcing his resignation from the National Rehabilitation Hospital.  His beefy lacrosse legs never atrophied, and retained sensory feeling, although he had no motor control.  Alone at home, boiling water for tea, he spilled the steaming pot on his bare legs.  He felt the excruciating pain, but could not move fast enough to escape.  It took 300 staples to hold his burned flesh together as he healed.  Later, a lift van operator in Washington, D.C. accidentally pitched him forward on the sidewalk.  He suffered a concussion and 20 stitches. 

Through it all he became one of the nation’s foremost experts on the Americans With Disabilities Act and spoke often to business groups about ways they could apply its rules in their best interests, and the interests of their employees with disabilities.  He and Maggie conducted seminars in which they asked participants to select a disability they would prefer to have from a list of sobering choices: cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, quadriplegia, and others.  They sought empathy, yes, and respect and support, but not sympathy, always emphasizing the talents and skills persons with disabilities could contribute to every industry and profession.  He applauded the disAbility Coalition of Talbot County for spelling its name with a small d and capital A to emphasize abilities.  “We’ve got to raise public awareness and reduce stigma,” he said over and over. Price was a champion for persons with disabilities, extolling their work ethic, dependability and loyalty to chambers of commerce and employer groups.

Three days before he died, we were to lunch with Ernie Holthausen and Bill Griffin, key players in raising money for Chrissie’s van.  Price showed up late to tell us he was on his way to see his doctor and couldn’t stay.  It was the last time I saw him.

Price was 33 years my junior, but no man taught me more about loving one’s neighbor, going the extra mile for a friend, or facing challenges courageously than this remarkable man in a wheelchair who always greeted me with a broad smile and a cheery, “Hi, mate.”  

I wrote a play about his life, “Hi, Mate, I’m FPB” (Fearless Price Baum) directed by Lynn Sanchez and performed by local actors, including Lynn’s husband Rob, at the Avalon Theatre in 2007.  Price’s friends filled the historic theatre, and his brothers flew in from Paris and Bermuda for the show.  I hope the Hugh Gregory Gallagher Motivational Theatre, Inc. might perform the play this year, on the fifth anniversary of Price’s untimely passing.  Price knew and admired Hugh Gallagher, and they testified together in support of the Americans With Disabilities Act. 

The disability community continues to miss Price’s leadership. He was their champion.  His friends still miss him deeply.  He was their inspiration.

                                                   ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

In praise of older women

 I was a 19-year-old soldier on a three day pass the night two older women smothered me with warm affection, kept the beer flowing, told wild stories of their youth and Irish jokes that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. 

     I’d stopped at their apartment just to say hello on my way to meet an older army buddy, Johnny Hall, all of 25, at Oliver’s Lounge in Buffalo.  Johnny said the blind date he’d lined up for me “could be Lana Turner’s sister; so don’t be late, Spitz.”  John had wheels.  I rode the bus.  

      But the fawning women were so much fun I forgot the time, and it was midnight when I bade a reluctant farewell and thumbed a ride to my parents’ home in Kenmore.

      A Cadillac with an older woman at the wheel pulled to the curb.  “Hop in, soldier,” she smiled sweetly.  Imagine, a second adventure with an older woman before the night was done.

      I began to turn over in my mind the story I would tell Johnny when he groused about my not showing up to meet the image of Lana Turner, although handsome Johnny had been known to squire two ladies on more than one occasion.

      But I was embarrassed to tell this man of the world that I’d spent the entire evening with my much older unmarried cousin, Theresa Rogers, and her aging mother, Agnes, looking at snap shots of their youth and listening to endless stories of Frank,  Theresa’s older brother, a champion swimmer whose trophies adorned every wall.  He died before I was born from wounds suffered in France during World War I.  

      The woman who picked me up, Mrs. Richardson, whose yacht company had converted to defense contracts, graciously drove out of her way to drop me at the door of my home.

      Johnny would not be pleased that I didn’t show up.

      So when he came by the house the next day, I was ready.  I didn’t lie, actually, but failed to identify the charming older women who’d held me captive with beer, jokes and abundant hugs and kisses, or fill in details of getting “picked up” by a gorgeous older woman in a Caddy. 

      Johnny just smiled and gave me a long questioning stare.

      He never said another word until we were back at work as medical technicians that winter of 1944.  But stories have a way of spreading and growing in the retelling.

      A few weeks later, after dancing with the director of nurses at a party at the base hospital – an ancient lady of at least 35 - one of my favorite doctors, Ben Lasher, took me aside and gave me some friendly advice:  “Look, kid, I know you like older women, but I think it would be a lot healthier for you to date girls your own age.”

      I stood there with my mouth open as the stern-faced doctor strode toward the door.   But as he walked by my friend Johnny, he nodded and Johnny grinned, and I knew the joke was on me.

     My dear mother had spilled the beans to Johnny quite innocently when he asked where I’d been the previous evening.  “Wasn’t he a dear to visit with Tess and Agnes?”   Johnny agreed I surely was, never mentioning the grave burden I had bestowed on him at Oliver’s Lounge.

     Years later I ran into Johnny at the Hotel Hamilton bar in Utica, N.Y.  “Yeah, I spread the myth of your affection for older women, and actually the director of nurses was intrigued.  But doc Lasher who dropped your jaw was in on the joke, as you discovered.”

      We tapped glasses and had a good laugh.  Old friends recalling a funny story with a moral:  even white lies have consequences.  

                                               *** 

Carlton E. Spitzer         

Personalizing torture

Thank you, Senator John McCain, for setting the record straight on the use of torture.  You who suffered horrific abuse in a Vietnam prison, and have access to CIA and defense department intelligence.  It’s not the first time you’ve responded to advocates of torture who would abandon American principles and values.  But your latest statement could not have been more timely.

      From the moment of Osama bin Laden’s death at the swift hands of Navy SEALS May 1, defenders of torture have claimed our troops learned of his whereabouts from captives who were waterboarded , deprived of sleep, and humiliated sexually.  You’ve made clear that isn’t true.

     During your campaign for the White House in 2007, you told fellow citizens a person subjected to excruciating pain will say anything they believe torturers want to hear, and that those who torture debase themselves and fail to achieve their objective. 

     You repeated that statement in your Washington Post column May 12.  And deftly blunted the allegation of former attorney general Michael Mukasey that bin Laden’s lieutenant, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, loosed a torrent of information while being tortured, including the nickname of bin Laden’s courier.  You said that is false, noting that none of the detainees who were waterboarded provided the courier’s name, or bin Laden’s whereabouts. CIA Director Leon Panetta affirmed your statement. 

      Interrogation by the Geneva Accords elicits more reliable information than obtained through barbaric torture.  “Enhanced interrogation” is torture’s sanitized label.  Why is it so difficult for Members of Congress and military brass to call it by its name?  From the Spanish Inquisition through the Third Reich’s brutality and Japan’s sadistic death marches and inhumane treatment of prisoners in World War II, torture has dehumanized mankind. 

      Consider what torture does to the torturers and our nation’s reputation.   Few American can forget photos of smiling guards stacking naked prisoners in pyramids while they forced other captives to simulate sexual acts and crawl like animals with leashes around their necks  Those photos, circulated around the world, deflated a lot of pious talk about American values.

       Abu Ghraib was said to be an aberration, a stupid breach of human decency by a few low-level guards on the night shift.  In fact, those atrocious abuses resulted from high-level permissiveness that gave license to poorly-trained personnel who created recruiting posters for Al-Qaeda.  Justice department attorneys wrote memos to the president justifying torture, although the U.S. had officially proclaimed waterboarding torture during the Spanish-American War.

       Select Members of Congress were briefed on “interrogation practices” in 2002, and few raised objections.  Those who had second thoughts in 2007 when McCain spoke out had been silent for five years. The CIA, only belatedly embarrassed, destroyed videos of its interrogations in 2005.  That their destruction was illegal was apparently of no concern.

       McCain has no desire to prosecute military and civilian personnel engaged in renditions and torture who were given license, formally or informally in the past.   But he does want the practice stopped.  Now.  First, because it is unnecessary and unproductive.   Second, and more important, because it is a moral issue, not a utilitarian debate.  “It is,” McCain says, “about who we are.”

                                                     ***

Carlton E. Spitzer    

      

You better believe it!

     A television documentary on comedian Shelly Berman in the late 1950s was intended to show how hard funny men and their writers must work to keep audiences laughing week after week.  Shelly’s manager was a big, gregarious man from Pennsylvania named Harry Bell who had earned his stripes at the Music Corporation of America and become a theatrical agent for some of the great names in show business.

     As the documentary cameras rolled, a phone rang just off stage, interrupting Shelly’s monologue.  In a rage, he raced across stage, yanked the offending phone from the wall, and smashed it on the floor.

     Knowing Shelly’s volatile temperament, Harry had inserted a clause in the agreement with the documentary producer retaining the right to edit.  In the dressing room that evening, Harry urged Shelly to scrap the unfortunate telephone episode.  But Shelly’s wife thought the incident dramatized the stress her poor husband endured every week to put on the show.  It stayed in.

     The documentary was panned; the telephone episode ridiculed.  Shelly forgave his wife but fired Harry.

     The big guy told me the story with gestures years later when I hired him for just 30 days to schedule the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on television talk shows.

     A charmer, Harry made Secretary John W. Gardner feel at home before the cameras, and Gardner was a big hit on the popular Mike Douglas show.

     “You did a great job, Harry,” I said, shaking his huge hand.

     “You better believe it,” he replied with a grin.

     I was to hear that phrase a thousand times during the next 35 years: congratulating him for a winning hand at cards, for catching the biggest fish, or more often, for telling the biggest fish story.  “You’re great, Harry,” his loyal pals would exclaim.

     “You better believe it,” Harry would laugh.

     On the strength of that 30-day contract we signed in 1966, Harry sold his house in Westchester County, N.Y. and moved to Maryland with his wife, Frances, and two sons, Gordon and Douglas. 

      “Don’t worry, I’ll prove my worth and you’ll keep me on,” he said confidently.  I ended my appointment as Director of the Office of Public Information at HEW in 1968 when Gardner resigned.  Harry stayed on almost 20 years, first as a media specialist in the Office of the Secretary, then as a program manager at the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Maryland. 

    He was Barnum and Bailey, W. C. Fields and Mark Twain rolled into one, huge, bigger-than-life enthusiast who told outrageous stories about show business people with such flair and good humor that listeners were always amused and rarely offended.  He loved life, a good story well told, jokes of all shades, being with friends, playing cards, and traveling around the country with Fran in their mobile home.  He was earthy and irreverent and delighted in meeting new people.

    On the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in the shops at Cape May, New Jersey, or touring Tangier Island, Virginia in an oversize golf cart, Harry would start up conversations with total strangers.  Within minutes, an observer would assume they were old friends.  The wild stories he told were mostly true, but embellished with each telling.

     “Harry, did it really happen that way?”

     “Hey, you better believe it.”

     After retiring from government, he graduated from auctioneer’s school in Iowa and set up his own firm, Blue Bell Antiques and Appraisers in Rockville, Maryland.  He loved being an auctioneer.  Frances recalls how curious he was about the history of books, furniture and all kinds of household items, and his genuine interest in the people who owned them, even after he gave up the business and they moved to Lewes, Delaware.

     Harry and Fran were enjoying a long-delayed European vacation in 1982 when he noticed a lump on his sternum.  A biopsy confirmed his fears when he got home.  Multiple myeloma.  Radiation followed.  Then remission. 

     But as the years passed, cancer returned in his lower spine and hip. Chemotherapy, radiation, experimental drugs and surgery became a way of life. 

     “Listen, you’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt,” he would say matter-of-factly.  And he did, with amazing courage.  Frances, a registered nurse, was his indefatigable supporter and counselor.

     This energetic, six-foot-five, 270-pound giant of a man began to use a cane.  He lost strength, became unsteady and traded his cane for a walker.  He never complained and pushed himself to visit friends and travel with Fran.  They even toured Alaska in their RV.  Frances did the driving. 

     Harry’s heart attack, followed by open-heart surgery while visiting their son, Gordon, in York, Pennsylvania, persuaded them to sell their home at Lewes and move into a condo near Gordon.  Harry became ill the day they arrived and was taken to York Hospital for colon cancer surgery. Later he had surgery to repair a broken hip, compromised from previous radiation. 

     Joan and I visited Harry and Frances on March 12, 2002.  Cancer had come back once more, this time in his cervical vertebrae.  He was receiving daily radiation and wore a hard neck brace.  But we played cards, told stories, and he joked with the young man who came to install a new cable television.  “It’s going to be great to have all these channels,” he enthused.

     Surgery March 21 repaired vertebrae in his neck with bone from his hip.  But 20 years of battling cancer had reduced his weight by 100 pounds and sapped what little strength he had left.  He got pneumonia, fought it off somehow, but never left the recovery room.  He died just after midnight, on Easter morning.

     Surely a compassionate Lord has reserved a special place in Heaven for people like Harry who suffer so much and live so courageously on earth. Ever the showman, Harry managed to take his final bow on the Day of Resurrection.  I picture him regaling his new friends on Cloud Nine with the story of Shelly Berman yanking the phone off the wall. 

     “Really?,” questions Saint Peter, arching an eyebrow.

     “You better believe it,” says Harry.

     I confess I’d like to hear Harry tell that story just one more time myself, you know, with a little something added.  Like always.

     You better believe it.

                                                  ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

Wanted: a new age of discernment

Had Adolf Hitler not been such a big fan of Mickey Mouse he probably would have barred American films from Nazi Germany. 

     Their popularity in German movie houses complicated life for propagandist Joseph Goebbels who disdained all things foreign as he manipulated the power of mass media to march the people to war against border nations and their own Jewish neighbors.

     Foreign films, especially from the United States, displayed a fanciful world to which humans aspired in the late 1920s, although by the time the Olympic Games were held in Berlin in 1936,  featuring Jesse Owens’ remarkable feats, America was still in the grip of a terrible depression.

     Hitler had summoned young Goebbels to Berlin in 1924 to bolster public support for his floundering political movement.  Later, Reich President von Hindenburg, at Hitler’s urging, named Goebbels, a former journalist, failed author and playwright, Minister for the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda.

     One is stunned the people did not rise up when they heard the title.

     He was 36 years old; immoral, ambitious, not brilliant, but very discerning.  Fear, he knew, could unite a beleaguered people discouraged by years of inflation and personal sacrifice, hungry for a bold leader who promised a bright future for the “master race.”

     Eugen Hadamovsky, head of German radio, said Goebbels had made political propaganda an art form and hailed him as a master of manipulation.  The master con man was praised for his deception.

     Every aspect of German society was infiltrated quietly, deftly, especially the arts.  Goebbels spoke for Hitler.  No one dared to ignore him.  He did not ban popular performers and authors.  He coerced them.  Praise and wealth were rewards for cooperation.  Dissenters suddenly had no work.  Those who asked hard questions were charged with disloyalty.  Publishers, editors, authors, playwrights, musicians, singers and film-makers became tools of Goebbels’ propaganda.   Those who would not comply fled their homeland.

     Happy stories extolling the lives of happy people were the rule.       Jews were declared the enemy of the Third Reich, not for anything they had done or failed to do, but simply for who they were.  Goebbels trumped up charges, inspired rallies, burned Jewish books, banned Jewish performers.  Socialists were outcasts.  Fascism infiltrated every aspect of society, soon controlling every discipline and industry.

      Popular artists and performers were enlisted as heads of particular Reich Chambers to assure the people that Germany’s new leadership respected their esteemed place in German society.  No painter could exhibit, no singer could broadcast, no critic could comment, unless they were a member of the particular Reich Chamber that supervised their activities. 

      The ugly truth was they’d been recruited and compromised.  Even the beloved Richard Strauss was enlisted as head of the Reich Music Chamber.   

       Big salaries were paid for cooperation.  Goebbels’ prize oxymoron praised the Third Reich as savior and benefactor of the arts.   In fact, membership in the various Reich Chambers demanded subservience.  Discerning citizens who raised questions were ostracized. 

       Everything was to be done for the good of the Fatherland: retribution for ills suffered during and after World War I; support for measures that might help stabilize the economy after a period of paralyzing run-a-way inflation; even the murder of thousands of disabled persons, called “useless eaters,” and later, mass murder of Jews to purify the “master race.”

       Goebbels was the author of Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass – killing more than 2000 Jews, destroying Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues and sending 30,000 Jews to concentration camps.  Millions were to follow them to their deaths.   Many were victims of cruel medical experiments.

        How could such an extraordinary people, gifted in music, science, medicine and the arts succumb to blatant propaganda and acquiesce to depravity and pursuit of a “master race”?  

       It did not happen swiftly.  Goebbels had his enemies within the Third Reich and he sometimes displeased Hitler with his publicized amorous affairs.   But Hitler valued him highly because he blunted the natural discernment of the German people under a blanket of fear, false promises and illusions.  His cunning had steadily, relentlessly stripped  independence from men and women who previously spoke freely, making them partners in his deception. 

       Blind obedience, Hitler knew, would silence objective discussion.

       And discernment, Goebbels knew, depended on the freedom of people to ask hard questions, and the support of fellow citizens to challenge government policy.

       Hitler died  by his own hand in a bunker as American troops neared in 1945.  In the decades since World War II,  dozens of dictators in various countries of the world have mirrored his cruelty, but few have exceeded it.  All have been concomitantly feared and hated.  Every one stifled discernment.

        Former senator Bob Dole, and the late Hugh Gregory Gallagher, author of, By Trust Betrayed, that chronicled the German medical profession’s complicity with the Third Reich, warned that Hitler and Goebbels provided lessons for today that should be heeded.

       The world needs a refresher course on discernment.  Schools must teach objectivity and pursuit of truth.  A thing should be called by its real name.  Facts must not be twisted to suit ideology.   Science must not be sacrificed for political expediency.  People must be free to express opposition; to reject propaganda. 

       To do that they must first discern the truth, demand authentic rationales for political adventures, and hold elected officials accountable.  

                                              ***

Carlton E. Spitzer

Language skills unite people and nations

      Students donned earphones to hear my lecture at the University of Madrid in 1972.  “Speak in short declarative sentences so I can translate accurately,” the interpreter instructed with a tight smile.  She disappeared behind a screen to my right.

     I was on a United States Information Agency (USIA) speaking tour, my Spanish woefully inadequate to address students in their own language.  I would speak a few sentences, pause, and wait for students to smile, frown or nod to judge their reaction. 

     My escort from the American Embassy assured me the university translated foreign speakers 90 percent of the time.   But I found it an awkward experience.  It had been difficult to convey corporate social responsibility concepts in English to business audiences in the States; little wonder foreign students struggled to make sense of it through an interpreter.

      Language is essential to understanding different cultures, breaking down attitudinal barriers, and winning hearts.

     A granddaughter raised in Alaska fell in love in Senegal while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer.  Mariah and El Hadji married in 2007 near Mt. McKinley and a year later welcomed their daughter Leila into the world at Fairbanks.  Mariah majored in French at college, a second language in Senegal.  Had she majored in German or Spanish, their romance might not have blossomed.  

      My old friend Jim McCrory composed messages in Tokyo during the Korean War for Japanese interpreters to broadcast to mainland China and North Korea.  Not a single American in his group had language skills to monitor what interpreters were broadcasting.  “We had trust and confidence in our Japanese colleagues, but Lord knows what was actually aired over, ‘Voice of the United Nations Command’,” he reflected. 

      A Green Beret, who excelled in Arabic language classes, left the Army to attend graduate school.  No one offered him a promotion to stay and train others, although our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are never sure whom they can trust and often have no idea what their interpreters are actually saying.    The Department of Defense belatedly addressed the problem by forming the National Security Education Program (NSEP). 

     Former Health, Education, and Welfare official Morton Lebow applauds expansion of our citizens’ ability to speak, write and understand other languages, but is disappointed impetus comes from the DOD.  “This puts the wrong imprimatur on what should be a national effort initiated by the Department of Education.  Then again, perhaps we should be grateful it’s being done at all.”

Ray E. Hiebert, former dean of journalism at the University of Maryland, and former director of the Washington Journalism Center, says, “While the military should be more culturally aware and linguistically adept and practice more public diplomacy, the DOD should not be in charge of public information and education.  In the hands of the military, it is certain to turn into public propaganda, even more than it would at the State Department.   The program should be conducted by an independent agency answerable only to Congress.  I did a lot of work for the USIA and Voice of America (VOA) when they were independent agencies, both genuinely concerned with disseminating news and aiding diplomacy.  I cut ties when these agencies were transferred to the State Department.”

  Hiebert studied under Edward Barrett at the Columbia Journalism School, who was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the early days of the Cold War.  Barrett’s book, Truth is Our Weapon, guided the work of the USIA and VOA.  “That principle, adhering to objectivity and truth, was crucial to winning the Cold War,” Hiebert says, “and I don’t think today’s Defense Department thinks in those terms.”

 Cynthia Thornburgh teaches English as a second language at Portland, Oregon’s community college, one of the largest in the nation.

“I’m a strong proponent of teaching foreign languages at an early age because language and culture are inextricably entwined.  America is out of touch with much of the world in terms of global understanding.  First world countries teach English to kids learning to walk.”

  Thornburgh says language learned before puberty is essentially a first language and two or more languages can be learned simultaneously.  “After puberty, the brain’s language acquisition device is altered and adapting to a new language becomes more difficult,” she says.

  She believes if more Americans were bilingual they would be more tolerant and understanding of different cultures, less critical and more diplomatic.  Thornburgh is convinced America’s diplomats and ambassadors should be fluent in the nation’s language to which they are assigned.  Kindergarten, she says, is the time to start training.

   Making language a part of career ladder mobility should add incentive.  But as Lebow and Hiebert caution, the program should be independent, accountable only to Congress, with a broad reach that encompasses all departments of government.

                                               ***

Carlton E. Spitzer   

A time for reflection, not celebration

     Osama bin Laden is dead.  Killed in a well-planned and swiftly executed raid by Navy Seals, based on intelligence gathering.  No shock and awe.  No drones.  A few highly-trained men achieved a goal set by President George W. Bush immediately following the horror of 9/11: find Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

    That the Seals were not fired upon suggests possible collusion with Pakistan to allow the raid.  Details will emerge in time.  For the moment, Americans are grateful the raid was successful, that no Americans were killed, and that Terrorism’s leader is gone.

     Many Americans took to the streets May 1 to celebrate bin Laden’s death.  Others visited places of worship to give thanks he could no longer incite hatred against the United States.  Families of those who died in the air and on the ground in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania September 11, 2001 may feel some sense of relief. 

      But we should keep in mind that the search for bin Laden during the past nine years should have focused on unprecedented, tightly coordinated international sleuthing.  Bush responded with military might, engaging thousands of troops in two unnecessary wars and chastising friendly nations reluctant to go to war that might have been helpful investigators.

      This should be a time of sober reflection, not wild celebration.  We sent troops into Afghanistan in 2001 to search for bin Laden in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border.  Then invaded Iraq in 2003, which had no involvement in 9/11, on the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to its neighbors and the United States.  Had United Nations arms inspectors been allowed to complete their work we would have known with certainty that Saddam Hussein had no such weapons.

       We compounded our boastful “shock and awe” Iraqi occupation by placing  more boots on the ground there and in Afghanistan.  Neither action advanced efforts to locate bin Laden, but did kill thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, including women and children, and spawned two million refugees. 

       Thousands of our sons and daughters, husbands and wives have lost their lives in these wars of choice.  And the count continues.   Many thousands more have lost limbs, and suffered post traumatic stress.   The incidence of domestic violence and suicides among returning veterans is alarming.  And we still have boots on the ground in both nations as we struggle to find our way out. 

        If we had avoided war and put all that human and materiel treasure, all that energy, cunning, and determination into intelligence gathering to find bin Laden and eradicate terrorists cells from many nations, we might have found him long ago. 

        Since World War II we have become a militaristic nation, seeking military solutions to every kind of international dispute, often supporting the bad guys if they could provide oil or serve our commercial interests.

        Terrorists do not wear uniforms or represent  nation states.  They’re scattered and hidden among us.  Only through sophisticated intelligence can they be identified and eradicated.

        We need to soberly measure the true cost of military action since 9/11, acknowledge that intelligence led us to Osama bin Laden, and that a small contingent of highly skilled and marvelously fit young  men conducted the raid that ended his life. 

                                                ***

All in one lifetime: amazing

     President Harry Truman desegregated military services in January, 1948, a few months before Joan and I were married in Buffalo.  The man from Kansas City was sharply criticized and little praised as his order was carried out.  He changed tradition with the scratch of his pen, but could not change ingrained attitudes. 

     Segregationists labeled Truman a traitor to his race; Ku Klux Klan members howled in protest under their white sheets.  African-American soldiers who’d lost limbs and earned medals for heroism in World War II had returned to a segregated nation that excluded them from restaurants and lodgings and relegated them to the back of the bus and the end of the line economically.  They had fought bravely and well, almost exclusively under the command of white officers. 

     The G.I. bill opened college doors to millions of returning veterans, motivating them to pursue careers they hadn’t considered before the war, but the vast majority of blacks and whites studied on segregated campuses. 

     General Benjamin O. Davis, who commanded the famed Tuskegee “Red Tails” on bombing missions over Africa, Italy and Germany, had received the silent treatment from his West Point classmates for four long years, and was subjected to untrue and career damaging criticisms after graduation.  Only belatedly did he receive praise for his outstanding leadership during the war.

      Young people today wonder what all the fuss was about back then.  After all, America has elected a bright, handsome, eloquent president of mixed race.   They’ve grown up in an integrated society, with racism hidden beneath the surface, not blatantly displayed.  They’re stunned to learn blacks were excluded from major sports and most professions.  As they assess the makeup of today’s baseball, football and basketball teams, they’re quite amazed coaches in a segregated society were able to field teams with only white players.

       Society has moved on, young people say.  Does it really matter if they understand blacks’ earlier struggle to break the color barrier in sports and the professions?  It matters profoundly.  The courage and determination of those agents of change set the stage for desegregation and eventually Barack Obama’s election.  

       1948 signaled change beyond anyone’s imaginings. Only a month after Truman desegregated military services in 1948, Lt. Nancy Leftenant became the first African-American in the Army Nursing Corp, and Reginald Weir became the first African-American to play in the U.S. Tennis Open.  The door had been opened.  There would be no turning back as blacks continued to struggle for equality.

       The United Nations established the World Health Organization in 1948 for “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.”  The color barrier was to be ignored.  Europe’s Common Market (EEC) was launched in Paris in 1948, and Truman urged Congress to adopt a civil rights program and universal health care.    

     European nations, shattered by war, picked up the pieces, brick by brick, looking to Truman’s Marshall Plan to rebuild their infrastructures and rekindle hope among their peoples, struggling to survive.

     In 1948, the State of Israel was officially announced in Tel Aviv, and North Korea declared itself the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.   At home, a ban on interracial marriages in California was voided by the state’s Supreme Court. 

Kennedy had listened to King, but moved with deliberate speed to push legislation on Capital Hill.   

His key pledge to the citizenry was to land a man on the moon and safely return him to earth within a decade.  The pledge was kept in 1969, but Kennedy did not live to see it.  His assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, only a few months after King’s triumph on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, affirmed hate’s presence and life’s fragility. 

A grieving nation responded to a new president, Lyndon Johnson, sworn into office aboard Air Force One that carried Kennedy’s shattered body back to Washington.

Kennedy’s photo was replaced by Johnson’s overnight in government offices throughout the capital city.  And to the dismay of Southern Legislators, Johnson championed Kennedy’s civil rights legislation. 

    Technology has changed the world in my lifetime: the computer, jet flight, the global positioning system, robotic surgery, space exploration. Troops severely wounded in war survive, thanks to swift transport to field hospitals, modern surgical procedures and prosthetic devices.  But we are more militaristic, global arms merchants without peer, engaging in unnecessary wars with grievous consequences for us and the sovereign nations we occupy.

 Many thousands of war’s veterans suffering post traumatic stress wait for mental health evaluation.  Family abuse is on the rise.  Suicide rates are alarmingly high.

 Those of us old enough to remember, and those too young to remember, saw in President Obama a man who could renew hope, heal divisions, and open paths to peace.  No more gleeful knee-slapping about shock and awe, no more dehumanizing others and ourselves through torture and arrogance, but rather the beginning of a new era in which mankind understands that hostility emerges from fear, humiliation, deprivation and pain, and that international challenges, especially terrorism, cannot be solved through military aggression. 

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Carlton E. Spitzer